A Journey in Astrophotography from our backyard

From April 19th around 1:00 I was able to find this group shot of galaxies known as Markarian’s Chain in the Virgo Cluster. The brighter ones are M84 and M86. An American astrophysicist Benjamin Markarian, found that a group of seven galaxies in this region are traveling together at about the same speed, with M86 (as the highest “blue shifted” object in the Messier Catalog) traveling toward us at 150 miles per second. Even though they are headed our way right now, in the long run they are attracted to the Virgo Cluster which is between us. Two galaxies just left of center are distorted by gravitational interaction and the one above is clearly asymmetrical.